An OS Inside An OS
As you might have guessed from the title of this blog, I’m a geek. In fact, I’m actually a professional geek. Rumor has it, being a geek is cool now. I’ll get back to you on that.
In any case, one of the ways my geek has expressed itself is in early support for Linux. I’ve used Linux, one way or another, for more than twenty years. It’s hard to believe, but it’s true. What’s more, I’ve been Linux certified for more than ten years! Strange but true! I don’t use Linux as my main operating system, though, because I live in the real world, not a Techno-Libertarian Utopia. And, yes, that means, I use Windows. At home, it’s Windows 10, because that’s what came installed on the laptops I got for my wife and I while I was a highly-paid contractor in 2016 and we were refreshing all our electronics. But, much to my surprise, there’s a way to run both Windows and Linux, together on the same machine! Without having a dual-boot system! Thanks to an article from the Linux Journal, which almost went the way of the dinosaurs last year, I have activated Windows Subsystem for Linux, which is ONLY available on Windows 10, and then installed Ubuntu, which is free, from the Microsoft Store. The little screen-shot at the top of this post is Ubuntu, running in its own, little window, on my Windows 10 laptop.
This is exciting!
Now, I can brush up my bash scripting by setting up a series of rsync jobs to keep my two Western Digital MyCloud drives in sync, essentially backing one up to the other. From the literature, I had thought that was built into the models I got, but it wasn’t. I tried to use SSH to get that setup directly on the MyCloud devices, since they’re running some limited *nix kernel, but something about the way they were configured made connecting one directly to the other and running rsync from working “as expected”. This, though, should get me around all that.
Now, all I have to do sort out the syntax for properly mounting the Windows shares I’ve set up in the Ubuntu virtual machine app. So, I’m not 100% there yet, but this is a great start!
